It has been a peculiar start to the cricket season. Not just because of the incessant sheeting, scouring, drenching downpours, a humiliation of rain that has at times seemed almost satirical in intention. But more for the reaction to the rain, which has been endured with an unusual degree of ferocity. In the last few days it has taken the veteran Mark Ramprakash to articulate a widespread sense that even the bad weather, goaded into existence by the decision to start the season a couple of weeks early, represents another England and Wales Cricket Board howler, a balls-up, a cowardly keeling over in the face of the Indian Premier League's aggressively expansionist 35C heat.

If English cricket is currently stalked by pathetic fallacy, its mood is likely to be soothed by the appearance this week of West Indies for a two-stage Test and one-day tour. Yes: West Indies are coming and it is, as ever, a wondrous thing. Even if they are also bringing with them a tour party that will provide further troubling suggestions of status-shift and libido-droop. Mainly because it is a tour party that still doesn't contain Chris Gayle.

Gayle is currently engaged at the IPL – sipping carbonated unicorn saliva, lounging on a solid gold beanbag, dawdling out to bat in his sponsored C-3PO suit – and will therefore not be available to endure the sodden hardships of early summer. In fact he will step out this very afternoon in the gilded sport pyjamas of Royal Challengers Bangalore, yawning the occasional bunt over the ropes, spearing in an off break or two, dozing off behind his shades at deep-wide-extra-whatever.

This is nothing new of course. Gayle hasn't played for West Indies since the 2011 World Cup due to what can only be described as a phenomenally boring and pointless wrangle with the WICB, albeit he may yet return for the one-day series here. But it is still all a little hard to take. Gayle isn't coming! A goofball, a profligate, even a rather silly-seeming person at times, he still makes for a horribly potent absence.

Most obviously Gayle leaves a charisma void. He is simply a grand talent and an attractively extreme individual. Where pretty much every other international cricketer – including the pop-kid batting tyros of India's new wave – retains that sense of journeyman familiarity, an air of scotch egg and room service and check-in desk, Gayle always looks as though he's just stepped off the bridge of his own disco-spaceship, staffed by a team of semi-feral Venusian mermaids.

Given free rein to become the first superstar freelance cricketer – and now installed as, if not the best, then surely the richest West Indian cricketer ever – it has become fashionable to see him as something closer to a roving superstar DJ than an international opening batsman. Just page his number and Gayle will appear, emerging from the nearest stretch-Hummer hefting his diamante baseball bat.

There is also a triumph of substance here. Make no mistake, Gayle is a Bradman of the short form, his strain of controlled fast-twitch top-order violence bringing with it giddy statistical riches. In last year's IPL he even made the clock strike 13, scoring 37 off a single over from Prashanth Parameswaran (6, 6 (no-ball), 4, 4, 6, 6, 4). If there is a sense of loss in all this it is simply that Gayle is also a compelling and substantial first-class batsman, the economy of movement he brings to his snub-nosed power hitting equally transferable to the grander form. He is one of the few men – along with Don Bradman – to have scored two Test triple hundreds.

Instead the West Indies will arrive with a team of grafters and roundheads, an anti-Gayle middle order of puritan severity. Darren Bravo, a diligent Lara-facsimile, will be a treat to watch, as will the pace bowlers and the endearing captain Darren Sammy, who at times appears to have absolutely no idea what's going on at all, why all these people are watching him, what this ball is for. And many in England will blame this dilution on the IPL, seen as kryptonite for the more vulnerable Test nations. Gayle may be the errant Fonze-king of West Indies cricket but there are plenty of others with him in India: Dwayne Bravo, Marlon Samuels, and the downy-cheeked spin prodigy Sunil Narine are all also unavailable for selection.

It is tempting to imagine this as a collision of the serious (Test cricket) and the frivolous (Gayle: cricket's own Christopher Biggins, centre stage and fabulous at every new Twenty20 beano). But it is also important to bear in mind that these are simply cricketers forced to make a choice in an environment where their own board cannot offer equivalent employment. Even the great West Indies teams, whose cricket seemed to enact a kind of punitive white-flannelled ballet, were often distinctly hard-nosed, powerfully present not just in county cricket but at Kerry Packer's proto-IPL World Series.

The mists will clear, the rain will stop, and cricket will one day right itself from its current state of power-broking format-jostle. Other Gayles will come too, perhaps even out of the recent rich seam of Caribbean cricketing talent. Perhaps next time we can even hope there might be incentive to stay inside rather than outside the fold.